Each day more than 200,000 United States Postal Service (USPS) carriers deliver mail to approximately 100 million individual domestic addresses. Before a carrier begins to walk through or drive through his or her delivery route, it is the carrier""s responsibility to put all of this mail into an appropriate sequence for efficient delivery. Under the present USPS procedure, the carrier assembles at least three delivery order sequenced stacks of mail, including letters, flats (including enveloped and non-enveloped magazines), and parcels.
A substantial percentage of the mail deliveries the USPS delivers on a regular basis consists of presorted mass mailings. These mass mailings typically consist of advertisements, promotional materials, solicitations, bills and similar materials. Such mailings are printed and/or addressed in accordance with a presort scheme to aid in delivery of the mailings and/or presorted in some cases down to the delivery point. The presort scheme is normally by destination address and the mailings are presented to the national postal service accordingly. Thus, the mail carrier, in addition to the above-referenced stacks of mail, also has one or more additional sequenced stacks, e.g., pre-sorted mass-mail items to be delivered to many or all of the stops on the delivery route the carrier collates the items for that address from each of the various stacks either in the post office or on the route and puts them all into the postal patron""s mailbox. This collating and/or sorting and shuffling through various stacks of mail is time consuming, inefficient, and consequently expensive to the USPS. Consequently, any reduction in the number of sequenced stacks that have to be sorted and shuffled through during delivery represents the potential for increased efficiency.
Presorted mail typically consists of mass mailings of sales materials, promotions and similar material. Current practice in the United States is for the mailing entity, e.g., presort mailer, to sort mass mailings according to destination based upon zip codes and addresses. For these mass mailings the carrier receives, for example, a stack of mail from a mass mailer that has been presorted by destination by zip+4+2 coding. Thus, the carrier has another stack of mail to shuffle through at each delivery stop.
To put mail in destination point order, a Delivery Bar Code Sorter (DBCS) and/or Carrier Sequence Bar Code Sorter (CSBCS) machine typically uses a multi-pass sorting scheme. Two- and three pass schemes based on significant digits of the delivery points are most common. These known strategies are explained in detail in U.S. Pat. No. 5,363,971, issued Nov. 15, 1994. In general, a multi-pass sort scheme starts with a disordered collection of mail have a common zip code and ends up with the same mail in a series of batches, one for each delivery point receiving mail. In order to accomplish the sort, intermediate batches of partially sorted mail are created that are then fed back into the sorter again for sorting according to a second pass sort scheme.
One potential way of eliminating an individual stack of presorted mail would be to sort the presorted mail, together with all unsorted mail, using existing equipment and processes, for example, a Delivery Bar Code Sorter (DBCS) and/or Carrier Sequence Bar Code Sorter (CSBCS). However this would entirely eliminate the purpose of presorting mail, i.e., to reduce the amount of sorting that has to be done by the mail service. Consequently, there exists a need for a method of reducing the number of individual stacks of mail to be handled by the mail carrier without adding additional mail sorting and handling equipment.
The invention provides a method for use by a presort mailer in creating a mailing consisting of a multitude of mail pieces addressed to a predetermined list of recipients having predetermined addresses, including the steps of:
(a) determining a batch scheme applicable to the mailing, wherein the batch scheme specifies batches of mail pieces to be grouped together, the batch scheme being based on a multi-pass mail piece sort scheme such that each batch contains mail pieces that can be sorted to mail carrier delivery order on a second or subsequent pass of the multi-pass sort scheme; and
(b) creating the mail pieces of the mailing in an order so that the batches of mail pieces to be grouped together according to- the batch scheme are created consecutively. Most preferably, each batch is created according to the first pass sort scheme so that each is ready for the second pass sort, regardless of whether a two- or three-pass sort scheme is used. It is not preferred to create each batch ready for the third pass of a three-pass sort because the individual batches in such a case would be too small.
In the above method, the multi-pass sort scheme may be based on a predetermined set of numbered delivery points each corresponding to a ZIP+4+2 destination code or other identification code, such as an identification code (ID-Tag) with a respective database containing the information associated with the code, or a xe2x80x9cfingerprintxe2x80x9d with a respective database containing the unique assignment from fingerprint to delivery point number. In one aspect, the mail pieces are created by printing addresses on a multitude of otherwise identical (or nearly identical) mail pieces in the order determined by the batch scheme. In one refinement, the multi-pass sort scheme is a two-pass sort scheme including a first pass sort based on a least significant digit of a delivery point number, and a second pass sort based on a the next higher significant digit of the delivery point number. The batches of mail pieces are created in an order suitable for the second pass sort as if such mail pieces had been sorted in the first pass sort.
In another embodiment, a presorted mailing of the invention comprises a number of groups of mail pieces, generally generated consecutively and kept together prior to shipment as described hereafter. Mail pieces in each group are addressed to different set of destination zones than mail pieces in other groups, and each group comprises a number of batches of mail pieces. Mail pieces in each batch are addressed to a predetermined list of recipients having predetermined addresses within a single delivery zone, and the addresses in each batch are determined according to a multi-pass mail piece sort scheme such that each batch contains mail pieces that can be sorted to mail carrier delivery order on a last (generally second and third) pass of the multi-pass sort scheme. Within each group, the batches are ordered consecutively for sorting on the second (or second and third) pass of the multi-pass sort scheme.
In another aspect, the invention provides a method of sorting mail including the steps of:
(a) utilizing the sorting criteria applied in the first nxe2x88x921 sorting passes of a carrier delivery destination multiple pass sorting process having n sorting passes to create a plurality of mail pieces having different destination addresses, the mail pieces being created in batches corresponding to the criteria used in the first nxe2x88x921 sorting passes;
(b) integrating the batches of mail pieces with batches of similarly ordered mail prior to the second (or second and third) sorting pass(es) of the carrier delivery destination multiple pass sorting process, and
(3) sorting the combined batches of mail in the second (or second and third) pass(es) of the carrier delivery destination multiple pass sorting process.
According to a preferred form of this general method, a method of integrating presorted mail with other mail during a multi-pass sort includes the steps of:
(a) determining batch schemes applicable to a plurality of groups G of a mailing M, wherein each batch scheme specifies batches B of mail pieces to be grouped together within each group G, each batch scheme being based on a multi-pass mail piece sort scheme such that each batch contains mail pieces that can be sorted to mail carrier delivery order on a last pass of a multi-pass sort scheme;
(b) creating the mail pieces in order so that the batches B of mail pieces to be grouped together are created consecutively for each group G;
(c) sending each group G to one of a number of distribution centers;
(d) combining each group G at its associated distribution center with respective batches of other mail pieces ready for the last pass of the multi-pass mail piece sort scheme; and
(e) executing the second (or second and third) pass(es) of the multi-pass mail piece sort scheme on the combined mail pieces. The other mail pieces may include batches of mail which have just been created in an earlier pass of the multi-pass mail piece sort scheme, batches of mail pieces created according to the invention (steps (a) to (c)) by a different presort mailer, or both. In this manner, at the distribution center, all mail intended for an individual delivery point is in a single batch and the postal carrier does not need to pull mail from several presorted stacks at each stop. These and other aspects of the invention are described and illustrated in the detailed description and drawings.